Eight

THEY DIDN’T BRING OUT the kind of flatbed cart they used to transfer an injured player off the field, calling for an ambulance instead while players from both teams knelt and formed a circle around DeLavarious Harmon.

Who still hadn’t moved.

Wolves Stadium was as quiet as it had been during the pregame moment of silence for Joe Wolf. Our offense didn’t even line up for one more snap in what would have been the last minute. The refs waited until the ambulance had left the field, then the lead official went to midfield and waved his arms, indicating that the game was over.

In my life, I’d never seen a game called before the clock officially ran out.

I was moving up through the stands then, pulling out the all-access pass I kept in my bag, taking the closest elevator down to the field level and the Wolves’ locker room, on my side of the stadium.

By the time I got to the runway, the ambulance was already gone. It was thirty minutes, maybe, since DeLavarious Harmon had collapsed. Some of our players were standing outside the locker room door, many still wearing their helmets. One of them was Ted Skyler, who looked at me and shook his head.

Danny Wolf was leaning against the wall next to the door, alone, eyes vacant, ashen-faced, phone in his hand.

I walked over to him.

“What happened?”

He turned and stared at me, almost as if he didn’t recognize me at first.

“What?”

“Danny, how is he?”

“He’s dead, is how he is,” my brother said.

Now I stared at him. My father had told me one time that in the history of the NFL, only one player had ever died during a game. Back in the 1970s. I don’t know why I knew his name in that moment, but for some reason I did. Chuck Hughes of the Lions. A heart condition nobody knew he had. The things you remember.

“How?” I said to my brother.

“How? He stopped breathing. That’s how.”

“A perfectly healthy twenty-two-year-old kid just dropped dead? He didn’t even get hit that hard on the last play.”

“Doc said he was dead before they got him into the ambulance.”

“Where’s his wife?”

“In the ambulance,” Danny said.

He turned to me, keeping his voice low.

“This is a terrible optic for us,” he said.

I looked at him.

“A terrible optic? For us? The kid was one of ours, Danny. And now he’s dead, not a goddamn public relations problem.”

He started to walk away. The media had been roped off, about twenty yards from where we were standing.

I grabbed my brother’s arm.

“Don’t make a scene,” he said.

“Everybody keeps telling me that.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You always wanted to be Dad,” I said. “Well, here’s your chance.”

“What does that even mean?”

I talked to him then as if he were one of my players.

“Do your job,” I said.